Rogue Nation

How China Uses Forced Confessions as Propaganda Tool
By STEVEN LEE MYERS

BEIJING — In the unpolished video that appeared on state television one October morning in 2015, Wang Yu, one of China’s most prominent lawyers, denounces her own son.
While she was herself under arrest, the young man had been detained after leaving the country without permission or the proper papers. 

He first flew to the southern province of Yunnan and then rode on the back of a motorcycle into Myanmar, his movements captured on closed circuit cameras.
“I strongly condemn this type of behavior,” Ms. Wang says in a monotone, sitting inside a featureless room. 

“This kind of action is very risky and is illegal.”
It was all a lie, as her colleagues suspected when the video first aired.
Ms. Wang’s videotaped contrition was merely an example of how the Chinese authorities routinely coerce detainees into making statements that serve the government’s propaganda needs.
A human rights organization, Safeguard Defenders, has now detailed her case and others like it to draw attention to a practice it says violates fundamental due process and international legal standards — and to call out the media organizations in China and in Hong Kong that abet the practice by circulating the “confessions” and in some cases even participating in them.
Critics have long assumed these televised acts of confession and contrition were frauds. 

The organization’s report, released this week, analyzes 45 high-profile examples recorded and broadcast between July 2013 and February 2018.
More than half of them involved lawyers, journalists and others involved in promoting human rights in China. 

Many were shown “confessing” even though the formal legal proceedings against them had not yet begun, ignoring the presumption of innocence that is embedded even in Chinese law.
In 12 cases, the organization’s researchers interviewed those who were forced to record confessions, documenting in detail how the videos were carefully scripted and then broadcast.
What follows are examples of how the security forces use the confessions to demonstrate their raw jurisdictional power and to score propaganda points in an effort to deflect criticism at home and abroad. 

They ultimately show how powerless detainees are once they are swept into the Chinese legal system.
“I don’t expect everyone to understand,” Ms. Wang said, explaining the agonizing decision she made to agree to the interrogators’ demands in exchange for her release. 

“I just want to say that my son is everything to me. Perhaps I had no other choice.”

Confessions send a message
Lam Wing-kee was the manager of Causeway Bay Books in Hong Kong, a store that sold titles that displeased the authorities in Beijing. 

In 2015, he was arrested as he crossed the border from Hong Kong to the mainland, swept up in a series of cases against booksellers that continue to reverberate in Hong Kong, the special administrative region of China feeling the heavy hand of the central government.
Mr. Lam reappeared in February 2016 on Chinese television, where he “confessed” that his books — which included titillating descriptions of the private lives of Chinese leaders — were sensationalized and misleading.
In the report, Mr. Lam told researchers that he had to make a dozen recordings before those holding him were satisfied. 

He said they were made to seem like interviews and, in one case, a court proceeding, with a police officer posing as a witness. 

When Mr. Lam was released, he held an explosive news conference in Hong Kong, after which the authorities broadcast more recordings in an effort to embarrass him further.
Confessions are “much more than simple admissions of guilt,” the report said. 

They are meant as warnings to others who would challenge the state, and to discredit accusations of abuses of power by the Communist Party or the state security organs.
“China’s televised confessions are reminiscent of violent and degrading episodes of political persecution from history,” the report added, noting Stalin’s show trials and the public shaming sessions that were characteristic of China’s Cultural Revolution.

Deflecting international criticism
Gui Minhai, a Swedish citizen, was another of the booksellers caught up in the sweep in 2015. In his case, he was abducted from his vacation home in Thailand and returned to China. 

There he faced charges under mysterious circumstances that provoked international condemnation and the involvement of the government of Sweden.
Mr. Gui has since appeared in three recorded videos. 

In the first, he declared that he had returned voluntarily, which his relatives and colleagues strongly dispute.
The latest, shown in February, came after a bizarre turn of events. 

Mr. Gui, who was released from prison last year but kept under close scrutiny in the city of Ningbo, near Shanghai, was arrested in January aboard a train traveling to Beijing while he was accompanied by Swedish diplomats, who were ostensibly escorting him to medical treatment.
In a video broadcast on state television, Mr. Gui appeared tense, often pausing or repeating himself, saying that the Swedes were using him as a pawn. 

He was also shown being interviewed by the media in Hong Kong. 

The video here appeared on the website of The South China Morning Post. 

The newspaper faced criticism for its role but later said the interview was done without preconditions, with the "cooperation" of the authorities.
Mr. Gui’s daughter, Angela, who has campaigned for his release, told the report’s researchers that it was painful to watch. 

“It’s the kind of thing nobody should ever have to experience,” she said, “so there shouldn’t be words for it.”

Rogue Nation: The disappeared

Accounts from inside China's secret prisons
By Chieu Luu and Matt Rivers

Sui Muqing says he was forced to stay awake while he was interrogated for more than four days.
Chen Taihe describes being held in a jail cell so crowded he couldn't relieve himself.
And Peter Dahlin was left so traumatized by his experience, he slept with a knife next to his bed.
Three men, in three different parts of China.

They didn't know each other, but all had one thing in common: They advocated for human rights and became caught up in what activists say is the Chinese government's brutal crackdown on dissent.
Xi Jinping's wide-reaching sweep on perceived threats to both his rule and the Chinese Communist Party has led to the arrests of dozens of activists, bloggers, feminists, artists and lawyers.
The men, who CNN spoke to in detail over the course of the last 12 months, describe being forcibly taken from their homes, detained for weeks, sometimes months, in secret prisons, denied communication with family and legal representation, strong-armed into making videotaped confessions, and ultimately released without being convicted of a single crime.
Sui, Chen and Dahlin all say they were explicitly told not to talk about what happened to them, but have decided to speak out anyway. 

They say they want to shed light on the lengths to which China's government will go to silence anyone it deems a threat.
CNN reached out to the Chinese government for comment on each of the cases in this story, but received no response. 

Beijing has said regularly in the past that it does not torture prisoners and maintains these lawyers and activists are criminals dealt with under the law.

The 709 crackdown
While being a human rights lawyer has never been an easy path in Communist China, forced disappearances of lawyers were rare before 2015.
But on July 9 of that year, prominent Beijing rights lawyer Wang Yu disappeared, along with her husband, also a lawyer, and their teenage son.
The following day, police raided Wang's law firm and detained seven of her colleagues. 

Seven other rights lawyers were also detained or reported missing, according to the Hong-Kong based China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group, which has meticulously documented the cases. It became known as the "709 crackdown" -- a reference to the date the first arrests occurred.
Sui was among them. 

He'd earlier in the day spoken to two foreign media outlets to raise concern about Wang's disappearance.
That night, a security guard called up to Sui's apartment and said his car had been scratched in an accident and when he stepped outside, a group of police quickly whisked him away, said Sui. 

He wasn't seen again for nearly five months.

From left to right: Sui Minqing, Peter Dahlin and Chen Taihe.

Two days later, on July 12, the same thing happened to Chen. 

He said police asked him to come down from his apartment to answer a few questions. 

"I intentionally left my cell phone upstairs in my apartment because I thought I'd be back in a few minutes." 

He didn't return for six weeks.
During a period of less than a week, at least 146 lawyers and their families were detained in a nationwide swoop.
The roots of the crackdown on lawyers can be traced back to an editorial in the overseas edition of state-run People's Daily in July 2012, which warned the United States would use five categories of people to destabilize the Communist Party's near seven-decade rule. 

Rights advocates and lawyers were at the top of the list.
Dahlin, a Swedish national who co-founded a Beijing-based NGO that provided legal aid and training to Chinese lawyers, wasn't caught up in the first wave of detentions, and assumed his status as a foreigner might offer him some protection.
In early January 2016, however, he got tipped off authorities might be after him. 

He was about to depart for Beijing airport when 20 police officers turned up at his apartment.
They detained him and his girlfriend and they ransacked his home, he says, seizing computers and documents.
Dahlin says he was accused of masterminding a plan to smuggle the son of Wang Yu, the first lawyer to be detained in the swoop, into Myanmar, in an effort to evade authorities in October 2015.
He said investigators realized early on he had nothing to do with it, but instead of letting him go, quickly turned their attention to his NGO -- Chinese Urgent Action Working Group -- pressing him to give up information about his colleagues and other activists his group worked with.
Authorities said that Dahlin worked for an illegal organization that sponsored activities that jeopardized China's national security. 

The NGO said it "undertakes rapid response assistance for rights defenders in need."
By October 2017, some 321 lawyers, rights activists, their family members and staff had been caught up in the 709 crackdown.

How lawyers disappear

A key tool in the crackdown has been a relatively new form of detention. 

In 2012, China introduced "residential surveillance at a designated location" (RSDL) into the Criminal Procedural Law.
It appeared to legalize a long-used practice of "black jails" -- a means of temporarily detaining people outside the Chinese legal system who could not be immediately charged with a crime.
The government denied black jails existed in 2009. 

But in 2011 Chinese state media reported on a campaign by the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau to crack down on them.
The amended law says residential surveillance shouldn't exceed six months but requires detainees' families be notified within 24 hours, unless they can't be reached, and guarantees all suspects the right to a lawyer, with whom a meeting should be granted within 48 hours of a request.
The new system gives arbitrary detention a legal gloss and normalizes enforced disappearances. 

Earlier this year, 11 countries called on China to end the practice and investigate reports of torture against human rights lawyers. 

The UN High Commission on Human Rights has also called on China to halt the detention of lawyers.

Chen Taihe, a blogger, was detained in Guilin. He now lives in the US.

Although they were held at opposite ends of the country, Sui, Chen and Dahlin all describe similar conditions: Sparsely furnished rooms with black-out curtains on the windows and fluorescent lights kept on 24-hours a day.
They say they slept on a single bed, and were not allowed any reading or writing materials. 

Guards were always in the room watching their every move, even when they used the bathroom.
"There's nothing to look at except some very beige-looking suicide padding on the wall," said Dahlin.
He described being so bored he almost looked forward to the daily interrogations, "because at least you're taken out to another room ... and have some kind of interaction with people."
The interrogators used methods which Dahlin said reminded him of "bad American movies."
"They would have lots of people rush into your cell at night surrounding your bed just trying to scare you," he said.

Peter Dahlin, a Swedish national, was detained in China on January 4, 2016 and held for three weeks.

Just months earlier, Sui says he was held at a police training facility in Guangzhou, the free-wheeling hub of China's manufacturing heartland where he worked as a human rights lawyer defending a number of high-profile activists.
He says interrogators accused him of inciting subversion and pressed him to give them details ranging from his personal life and finances, to his work, clients, and all of his contacts.
Initially he refused to answer the questions, but his resistance only made his interrogators push harder. 

"They wouldn't let me sleep for four days and nights. By the fifth day, I felt like I was going to die," he said.
Sui said it was the sleep deprivation plus threats of torture which ultimately broke his will and made him cooperate. 

He said investigators threatened to shackle his hands, hang him from the ceiling and shine a flashlight directly into his eyes.
"I knew someone who had a heart attack due to deprivation of sleep in jail, so I was a bit frightened my life could be at risk if I continued to fight back," he said.

Sui Muqing, a lawyer, was detained from July 10, 2015 until January 6, 2016.

Chen, a professor who advocated for a US-style jury system in China on his blog, was first accused of "picking quarrels and provoking troubles," -- a vague charge often used by Chinese authorities that can carry a 10-year prison sentence. 

He told CNN he refused to admit any wrongdoing during a 20-hour interrogation, but then found himself sharing a jail cell with inmates accused of crimes ranging from petty theft to murder.
"The cell was so crammed I had to ask other prisoners to make room so I could urinate and defecate," he said. 

"I didn't have a spoon or chopsticks to eat with. We'd get one scoop of rice and would have to eat it with our hands."

After a month, Chen said he was told to collect his belongings. 

He thought he was going home -- but instead was driven to what appeared to be an abandoned hotel and held for another 10 days.
Earlier this year, CNN visited the nondescript building where Chen said he was held in Guilin, a southern city famed for its stunning landscape of karst mountains. 

Signs posted around the area in Chinese and English marked it as military property, but it otherwise appeared open and accessible.
Local officials denied that the building was used as a secret detention center.

The building in Guilin where Chen Taihe was held.

'You have to confess'
The rights activists held captive weren't just concerned about their own well being. 

Their loved ones were also threatened.
Dahlin's interrogators made it clear that they'd keep his girlfriend, a Chinese national, in custody for as long as it took to resolve his case.
"She was taken hostage just to put pressure on me," he said. 

Dahlin asked about his girlfriend every day but got limited answers.
"They said she was being treated quite well. That she was being given yoghurt and fruit and things like that. She was allowed to make a few drawings and do yoga in her room," he said. 

"They knew she had nothing to give them."
Finally, after more than three weeks, Dahlin was told he was going to be released -- but he had to do one thing: confess on camera.
He said he knew what authorities were really going to do with it. 

But wanting to speed up his release -- and that of his girlfriend -- Dahlin agreed to play his part.

Dahlin 'confesses' on state TV

He was taken into a room where a woman from state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) was sitting with a cameraman. 

Dahlin was handed a piece of paper with the questions that she would ask and the answers he would give.
"I have caused harm to the Chinese government. I have hurt the feelings of the Chinese people. I apologize sincerely for this," Dahlin said in the confession broadcast nationwide and splashed across state-run newspapers.
Immediately after its broadcast activists denounced it as a forced confession -- one of many that have been shown on CCTV in the years since Xi came to power.
Sui and Chen said they had to make similar "confessions." 

All three men now maintain their innocence, but they said they had no choice but to do as authorities wanted.
Sui says he admitted to charges of inciting subversion. 

Chen told CNN he confessed to charges of picking quarrels and provoking troubles, inciting subversion and embezzlement.
"You have to confess," Chen said. 

"Otherwise they won't let you go."

No end in sight
The crackdown on lawyers is still taking place.
On Tuesday, a court in Changsha, central China sentenced human rights lawyer Jiang Tianyong to two years in prison after convicting him of inciting subversion against the state.
In August, he had confessed in a trial that was streamed live online and watched by his wife Jin Bianling in California.
"He used to tell me, if I ever admit to a crime like this, it means I've been tortured," Jin said.
Jiang was a prominent human rights lawyer who had represented some of his colleagues targeted in the 709 crackdown, and was an outspoken critic of the government. 

He disappeared in November 2016, en route to catching a train from the central city of Changsha to Beijing. 

Months went by before the authorities confirmed he had been detained.
"Please give me another chance to be a human being ... and to make up for my wrongdoings," Jiang told a panel of three judges at his August trial.
Albert Ho, a Hong Kong-based activist with the China Human Rights Lawyer Concern Group, said Jiang, like other lawyers his group has spoken to, likely admitted to the charges in order to live to fight another day.
"Only an idiot would believe that he is truly speaking from his heart," Ho said.

Sleeping with a knife
Six days after his "confession" was broadcast on CCTV, Dahlin was released and expelled from China. 

His girlfriend was also released without charge.
Dahlin is now based in Thailand, but has trouble forgetting his time in detention.
"Early on it was quite extreme. Every little noise at night would wake me up. I'd sleep with a knife next to my bed, ready to stab the first Chinese person who comes into my gate," he said.

Wang Yu poses during an interview in Hong Kong on March 20, 2014.

Wang Yu, the first lawyer detained in the 709 crackdown, was charged with subversion, while her husband was charged with inciting subversion. 

They were both released on bail after more than a year in custody, after Wang's taped confession was aired on CCTV.
In it, Wang renounced her legal work and blamed "foreign forces" for using her law firm to undermine and discredit the government. 

Their son, who was detained along with them, was released soon afterward, but his movements have been heavily restricted.
Authorities never aired Chen's statement. 

He was released a day after recording it and the charges against him were dropped.
"I have no criminal record, but they can still use the video to discredit me," he said.
Chen and his family now live in US, where he's a visiting scholar at the University of California's Hastings Law School and studies the US jury system. 

He said he won't return to China until it becomes more democratic.
Sui was released on bail after his "confession," which was also never broadcast. 

He continues to practice law in Guangzhou, but said his movements have been restricted and fears the worst may still be yet to come.
"It's increasingly difficult to maintain a harmonious society through brainwashing," Sui said.
"The only resort left is violence. For anyone who's not submissive, a brutal crackdown is on the way."

Rogue Nation

China jails yet another human rights lawyer in ongoing crackdown on dissent
By Emily Rauhala and Simon Denyer

Jiang Tianyong in 2012.

BEIJING — A Chinese court on Tuesday convicted a prominent human rights lawyer of “inciting subversion of state power,” a vague charge often used to jail critics of the Chinese Communist Party, and sentenced him to two years in prison.
Jiang Tianyong, 46, is the latest lawyer known for defending government critics to be jailed. 

More than 200 have been detained over the last two years in the ongoing crackdown on criticism in China.
The court in the central Chinese city of Changsha said Jiang tried to “overthrow the socialist system” by publishing articles on the Internet, accepting interviews from overseas media, smearing the government and over-publicizing certain cases.
His defenders maintain these are all normal activities of his job as a lawyer.
The trial and sentencing are seen by human rights experts as an attack on what remains of the country’s legal activist community and on liberal politics in general, as Xi Jinping moves to bolster the Communist Party and purge its critics.
“This case has been an absolute travesty from the beginning, sustained by nothing other than pure political persecution, not facts or broken laws,” said Sophie Richardson, China director of Human Rights Watch. “By putting Jiang Tianyong behind bars, China does him, his family and itself irrevocable harm.”
“Jiang Tianyong’s trial was a total sham,” William Nee, China researcher at Amnesty International, said in a statement.
“Even with the most rudimentary examination of the facts, the case against him crumbles,” he continued. 

“His so-called confession and apology, extracted under duress, were nothing more than an act of political theater directed by the authorities.”
Jiang is one of more than 200 lawyers, legal assistants and activists detained in what is known as the “709 crackdown” for the day the purge started — July 9, 2015.
Some were released, but a number of leading lawyers have been charged with subversion, smeared in the party-controlled press, then subjected to what critics call political show trials, where they inevitably confess, on camera, to whatever charges they face.
In recent weeks, Chinese authorities stopped the child of another human rights lawyer who was targeted, Wang Yu, from traveling abroad to study. 

Wang’s lawyer, Li Yuhan, was detained in October.
Jiang was known for his robust defense of those criticizing the Chinese government.
Xie Yanyi, a Chinese rights lawyer, called him in a statement the “soul of the 709 rescue effort” for his determination to help colleagues in trouble. 

Jiang “spared no effort” when it came to defending China’s most vulnerable groups, Xie said.
Jiang disappeared into state custody in November 2016 as he traveled from Beijing to Changsha to advise another human rights lawyer, Xie Yang, who had been detained.
In January, Xie’s attorneys published a transcript of their client describing the torture he endured in custody. 

But at his trial in May, Xie denied his own account. 

At his own trial in August, Jiang told the court that he had helped Xie invent the account.
Experts see the turnarounds in Xie and Jiang’s testimonies as further evidence that “709” lawyers are being tortured while in custody. 

At his August trial, Jiang, looking defeated, confessed to the court — and the cameras — that he did everything prosecutors claimed and then asked, meekly, for mercy.
“We are concerned that throughout the proceedings Jiang Tianyong has not been allowed access to lawyers of his own choosing and that he was obviously prejudged through a ‘confession’ aired by Chinese TV before his trial had even begun,” German Ambassador Michael Clauss said in statement released at the time of trial. 

“Under these circumstances, a fair trial is impossible.”
Jiang’s wife, Jin Bianling, who lives in Los Angeles, has already written to Matt Potinger, an adviser to Trump, asking for help with her husband’s case. 

“I am entreating you to save my husband,” she wrote in a letter dated. Aug. 24.
Jin said she was able to briefly speak with Jiang after the sentencing. 

She said she told him she will wait for him and that she hopes she will one day see him again.
“He said he misses us,” she said.

China must respect lawyers’ human rights

"By detaining and disappearing these lawyers and law firm staff, China is in breach of its international obligations as well as Chinese domestic criminal law and constitutional principles. 

"It is also violating the UN basic principles on the role of lawyers, the UN declaration on human rights defenders and the UN body of principles for the protection of all persons under any form of detention or imprisonment."

Wang Yu, a prominent Chinese human rights lawyer, pictured in April 2015. She and her husband Bao Longjun were arrested on subversion charges. Her son Bao Zhuoxuan has also disappeared. 
On 18 January 2016, senior lawyers, judges and jurists from many countries and international organisations wrote a letter to the Guardian to express our deep concern about the unprecedented crackdown on criminal defence and human rights lawyers that began on the night of 9 July 2015 with the enforced disappearance of lawyers Wang Yu and Bao Longjun, and their 16-year-old son, and has most recently included the emergence of lawyer Li Chunfu from over 500 days of incommunicado detention with signs of serious mental illness, as well as physical suffering.
From 9 July 2015 to the present, hundreds of lawyers, law firm staff, and family members have been subject to intimidation, interrogation, detention as criminal suspects, wrongful criminal convictions and forced disappearance.

We, the undersigned lawyers, judges and jurists, now write again to express our continued grave concern over subsequent developments in China, in particular the treatment of the lawyers and legal assistants named in our 18 January 2016 letter, as well as some of their close colleagues, supporters and family members.
We observe the following developments with concern:
• The authorities have continued to deny several of the detainees, who have been held incommunicado and are facing trial, access to their appointed lawyers (in cases including those of, Li Heping, Wang Quanzhang, and until recently Xie Yang and Li Chunfu.
• Detainees are reported to have suffered physical violence at the hands of prison guards: lawyer Xie Yang in January 2017 testified to torture methods including beatings; stress positions; several guards simultaneously blowing cigarette smoke in his face; food, drink and sleep deprivation; denial of medical care; denial of basic personal hygiene; death threats; and excessive questioning at the hands of the authorities. On 23 January 2017, lawyers Li Heping and Wang Quanzhang were reported to have been tortured with electric shocks that made them faint.
• Detainees are feared to have been inappropriately medicated (documented in the case of Li Chunfu, who was given pills for “high blood pressure” even though his blood pressure according to independent diagnosis is normal).
• The authorities have claimed that lawyers chosen by the detainees or their family members have been “dismissed” and replaced by lawyers chosen by the authorities (for example, in the case of Li Heping).
• Some detainees have suffered judicial persecution through implausible criminal charges and convictions including “subversion of state power”, “inciting subversion of state power” and other crimes against national security and public order (for example, in August 2016, Zhou Shifeng was sentenced to seven years in prison).
• Some detainees, including Wang Yu and her husband Bao Longjun and legal assistant Zhao Wei, are claimed to have been “released” from detention centres into private homes, and yet they are closely monitored and wholly isolated from friends and colleagues.
• Written, oral and video statements of self-incrimination and self-renunciation by the detainees, apparently induced by the authorities, have been released through official media channels (for example, lawyer Zhang Kai was induced to make such a statement, which he later retracted).
• The authorities have put pressure on detainees’ spouses, siblings, children and parents to persuade the detainees to confess and admit guilt (for example, video-recorded statements by the parents of lawyers Li Chunfu and Li Heping were obtained by means of false representations).
• Detainees’ families have suffered further persecution: for example, the wives of Li Heping, Wang Quanzhang, Xie Yang and Xie Yanyi have been subjected to police monitoring and harassment; the children of Li Heping and Wang Quanzhang have been denied enrolment at state schools due to police pressure; and the authorities have put pressure on the landlords of Wang Quanzhang’s and Xie Yanyi’s families to evict them from their homes.
• Detainees have been defamed through media reports, officially released video-clips and similar materials similar materials portraying them as criminals and enemies of their country.
Further, human rights lawyer Jiang Tianyong is being held on charges of inciting subversion of state power, after having been disappeared on 21 November 2016. 

A colleague and friend of several of the original detainees, lawyer Jiang Tianyong has been forcibly disappeared and on at least two occasions tortured in the past; and his health remains frail, partly as a result of previous torture. 

There is grave concern that his rights to personal liberty, the right not to be tortured, and right to a fair trial have been violated yet again.
We continue to be particularly concerned about people who have been detained and/or disappeared and tortured on past occasions of forced disappearance or criminal detention. 

These include Li Heping, his brother Li Chunfu, Wang Quanzhang and Jiang Tianyong, as well as Zhang Kai, who retracted his self-renunciation statement in late August 2016.
Xi Jinping has repeatedly stated that “China is a country ruled by law” and that “every individual [Communist] party organisation and party member must abide by the country’s constitution and laws and must not take the party’s leadership as a privilege to violate them”. 

Yet the events just described appear to move farther and farther away from those commitments.
China has signed and ratified the UN convention against torture and signed the international covenant on civil and political rights. 

By detaining and disappearing these lawyers and law firm staff, China is in breach of its international obligations as well as Chinese domestic criminal law and constitutional principles. 

It is also violating the UN basic principles on the role of lawyers, the UN declaration on human rights defenders and the UN body of principles for the protection of all persons under any form of detention or imprisonment.
In order to vindicate its claim to be a responsible stakeholder in the international community and to be a respected global superpower, it is imperative that China honour its international commitments to international conventions and human rights. 

Therefore, we respectfully urge China to:
• Ensure the release of the detained or arrested lawyers and others held with them without legal basis.
• Ensure access to counsel for all those detained, arrested or otherwise held as a criminal suspect.
• Confirm the whereabouts of those forcibly disappeared.
• Ensure that the rights of those detained, including their right to adequate medical treatment, are safeguarded.
• Ensure that those detained and their colleagues will be protected from any future control measures such as: tracking and following, violent attacks, soft detention, being “travelled”, being asked to have “chats”, criminal, administrative, judicial detention, forced disappearance, torture and psychiatric incarceration.
We will continue to monitor the fate of the lawyers and staff concerned closely.

Dominique Attias Vice-president of the Paris bar, general secretary of the International Observatory of Lawyers in Danger, France
Robert Badinter Former French minister of justice and former president of the French Constitutional Council, France
Gill H Boehringer Coordinator of the International Association of People’s Lawyers, former dean of the Macquarie University Law School, Australia
Laurence Bory President of the International Association of Lawyers (IAL)
Edgar Boydens Dormer president of the Dutch Brussels Ba, president of Lawyers with Borders (Belgium)
Kirsty Brimelow QC Chair of the Bar Human Rights Committee of England and Wales (BHRC), UK
Jean-Pierre Buyle President of the French and German speaking bar of Belgium
Reed Brody Counsel and spokesperson for Human Rights Watch, United States
David Collins President, American Bar Foundation (2014-2016), United States
Alexandre Couyoumdjian and Virginie Dusen Co-chair, Association of Armenian Lawyers and Jurists, France
Elizabeth Evatt Companion of the Order of Australia; former president, Australian Law Reform Commission, and member of the UN Human Rights Committee; currently, commissioner, International Commission of Jurists, Australia
Pascal Eydoux President of the French National Bar Council; president of the International Observatory for Lawyers in Danger, France
Carlos Fuentenebro President of the Bizkaia Bar Association, Spain
Ruthven Gemmell President of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe
Sonia Gumpert President of the Madrid Bar Association, Spain
Patrick Henry President of the Human Rights Committee of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE) and vice-president of Lawyers without Borders, Belgium
Asma Jahangir Jurist, president of the Supreme Court Bar Association of Pakistan, founding member of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan
Grégoire Mangeat President of the Geneva Bar Association, Switzerland
Michael Mansfield QC Barrister and professor at law, City University, London, UK
Andrea Mascherin President of the Italian National Bar Council, Italy
Juan E Mendez Professor of human rights law, former UN special rapporteur on torture, 2010-2016, Argentina
Marcus Mollnau President of the Berlin bar (Rechtsanwaltskammer Berlin), Germany
Manfred Nowak Professor of international law and human rights at Vienna University, Austria
Victoria Ortega Benito President of the Spanish National Bar Council, Spain
Christophe Pettiti General secretary of the Paris Bar Human Rights Institute, France
Stuart Russell Former administrative judge, Australia
Clive Adrian Stafford Smith Human rights lawyer, UK
David J Scheffer Former US ambassador at large for war crimes issues; Mayer Brown/Robert B Helman professor of law and director, Center for International Human Rights, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, USA

Rechtsanwalt und Notar Ulrich Schellenberg President of the German Bar Association (Deutscher Anwaltverein), Germany

'Hooligan Sparrow' filmmaker recounts how her documentary opened her eyes to China’s secret police

By Hugh Hart

When director Nanfu Wang learned that her debut film “Hooligan Sparrow” had made the feature documentary Oscar shortlist last month, she was of course excited but also a little anxious. 

Part political thriller, part travelogue, part character study, the film sheds unflattering light on China's secret police and, sure enough, within days of the Academy Award announcement, government authorities visited Wang’s family in China. 

Speaking calmly by phone from her current home in Brooklyn, Wang says, “National security people had been monitoring me and told my family to warn me not to say anything negative about China.”
Wang began ruffling bureaucratic feathers in 2013, when she spent the summer documenting the travails of activist sex worker Ye Haiyan, a.k.a. Hooligan Sparrow. 

Enrolled at New York University's news and documentary graduate program, Wang read on the Internet about Haiyan's campaign to expose conditions in the country's notorious $2 brothels and decided to tackle the topic.
The day she landed in China, Wang abruptly shifted focus to a disturbing scandal unfolding in Hainan province. 

There, six elementary school girls were sexually violated by their principal and another man at a local hotel. 

“Sparrow told me she was planning to protest the rape case and I realized at that point the story wasn’t going to be about sex workers anymore,” Wang recalls. 

“The rape case became the trigger for a film that's really about how far the government goes to silence dissent.”
Wang traveled light. 

In her backpack she carried a Canon DSLR camera, a small point-and-shoot, a pair of glasses embedded with a tiny camera and an audio recorder. 

It's all she needed to film the schoolyard demonstration where Sparrow brandished a sign reading, “Hey Principal, get a room with me and leave the kids alone.” 

Shortly after the protest, Wang documented a group of unidentified men removing Sparrow from the apartment she shared with her 13-year-old daughter. 

When Sparrow returned home, she was pressured to leave town. 

“From there, we were basically on the run,” says Wang, who immersed herself in the story to the point where she too became part of the action.
Hounded throughout five Chinese provinces, Sparrow and her resilient child eventually found refuge in a rural village. 

Meanwhile, Wang herself became a target of government surveillance. 

Standing outside a courtroom to film a hearing for human rights lawyer Wang Yu, Wang captured shaky hand-held footage of seeming civilians as they tried to grab her camera. 

Later, authorities questioned Wang for five hours and demanded to see her footage. 

The crafty filmmaker had already arranged for friends to smuggle her hard drives out of the country.
“I prepared a hard drive filled with a bunch of random landscapes that I'd filmed along the way, and that's what I gave to the authorities,” says Wang, who secretly recorded the interrogation. 

“The whole time they were questioning me, I couldn’t move and I felt like the recorder was burning my leg. Luckily, they didn't search me.”
Wang, who grew up in a small village, never even saw a documentary film until she moved to the U.S. at age 25. 

The making of “Hooligan Sparrow” opened her eyes to stealthy forces that had been hiding in plain sight throughout her youth. 

“It's like the movie ‘The Truman Show,’ where the guy realizes at the end of the movie his entire life was a lie. That's pretty much how I felt when I got involved in this protest and realized there were all these secret police on the streets monitoring people. Some of my old friends don't even believe what I tell them. They say, ‘You went to the U.S. for two years and now you come back and you're so critical!’”
After she returned to New York, Wang spent a year editing the raw footage, joined forces with executive producers Andy Cohen and Alison Klayman ("Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry") and watched “Hooligan Sparrow” become a sensation on the film festival circuit.
Looking back on her summer of living dangerously, she muses, “It was scary but from a documentary filmmaking standpoint, I'm grateful things happened the way they did. If I ended up making a story exactly the same as I imagined it at the start, that would be very boring. For me, this is the charm of documentary filmmaking.”